A Tale of 2 Hillaries

One climbed Everest, the other, um....let me see....

Yesterday Sir Edmund Hillary died. Typically an ABC newscaster botched a tribute with a parting reference to “Mr. Hillary” but I don’t think it would have bothered Sir Edmund. By all accounts he was an extremely modest and reserved man for whom titles held little importance. It is incredible to think that the only photo taken of the conquest of Everest was Sir Edmund’s shot of sherpa Tensing Norgay. Self-publicity was the last thing on his mind. Not only that, both men spent some time looking for traces of Mallory and Irvine, 2 mountaineers who had perished on the slopes of Everest nearly 30 years earlier perhaps having been the first to ascend the summit. Sir Edmund, you see, was not scared to prove that he had not been the first to conquer Everest. He also led expeditions to the Antarctic, traced the source of the Yangstee River and devoted himself to improving the lives of the sherpas of the Himalayas. Sir Edmund was a hero and a true humanitarian.

This week Hillary Clinton cried. She cried because either she thought she was going to lose the New Hampshire primary or because someone instructed her to cry to make her more likeable to the voters. No one calls Hillary Clinton “Mrs. Clinton” because that is too damn dowdy for someone of her self-importance. Hillary has achieved nothing in her career (other than convincing many people she has achieved something) but to listen to her you’d think she had climbed Everest single-handedly many times over. Hillary has an entourage of well-paid spinmeisters working 24/7 to make sure that barely an hour passes without her making headlines. The idea that Hillary could do anything without claiming credit for it is sheer fantasy. Moreover Hillary’s idea of humanitarian sacrifice is human sacrifice. Ask any Serb, Iraqi or Afghani. Depressing to think that for millions, Hillary is a selfless hero.

So there we have it. The Hillary on the right was a giant full of dignity while the one on the left just squeals and wallows in mud.

All aboard the investment banking gravy train!!

I’ll be earning lotsa dosh!!





Crime never pays. Unless you are in investment banking where the sky’s the limit. That’s the inevitable conclusion from the reported decision of JP Morgan to hire the unindicted war criminal Tony Blair as a strategic advisor. Gone are the days when you had to bring an impressive track record to the table to land a senior position at a major financial institution.

One wonders what insight JP Morgan thinks it is getting by bringing Toady on board. It’s rumoured that JP Morgan prizes Blair’s unique perspective on international politics and globalisation. I guess the management were too distracted with their gigantic losses on the sub-prime portfolio to notice this:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,,2207514,00.html

Blair’s perspective is about as unique as a black cab in London. The man is derivative from his head to his toe. His guiding principle in international politics is clear: America must never feel isolated. So why hire a Brit if you want an American perspective? I have a feeling that Bush interceded on behalf of his buddy to obtain this sinecure. Tony has a crippling mortgage to pay off and he needs to get cracking on boosting his earnings.

Then again, should we be surprised? Acquiring worthless assets appears to be part of JP Morgan’s core strategy.

US elections: The freak show continues

Democracy is ugly





I dislike Barack Obama. He is a windbag and is not the threat to the political establishment that people like to imagine. But at least he voted against the war in Iraq. So I was happy when he kicked Hillary Clinton’s large and ever-growing backside in the Iowa caucuses. I am really sorry he couldn’t repeat the triumph in New Hampshire but that’s the way it is in the United States. Just when you think the voters may have smelled a rat, they pull out a bag of bread crumbs and start feeding it. Humiliating Hillary was simply beyond the courage of American voters. And all she had to do was shed a few tears on prime-time television in response to yet another obviously planted question (“How do you keep upbeat and so wonderful?” Oh yuck!). That was the signal for Hillary’s reserve army of aging feminists to storm the polling booths and swing the election in favour of “experience”. What experience? The experience of failing to reform health care under her whoring husband? Of watching impassively as former friends from Arkansas went to jail or were found dead on park benches in Washington? Of participating in dodgy property deals and making money off questionable commodity trades? Or was it the experience of ignoring her husband’s lifelong philandering? Perhaps it was the experience of voting to support Bush’s disastrous military adventure that qualifies her to become C-in-C. I am reminded of the words of AA Milne: “Three cheers for Pooh! For who? For Pooh? Just tell me someone – what did he do?” Exactly. Just what has Hillary achieved that makes her “experience” so valuable?

Just as depressing was the victory of John “Bomb, Bomb Iran” McCain. Lunacy has obviously become a pre-requisite for the Republican nomination. The nightmare scenario is Hillary the Bitch vs. Madman McCain in November 2008. Keep the cyanide handy.

Long Live Lavrov

Thank God for Sergei Lavrov. I watched Russia’s foreign minister in action yesterday on the BBC. Without hesitation he dismissed the absurd “exceptionalist” argument for Kosovan independence. Of course the BBC would like us to believe that Russia is being obstructive. It’s open season on Russia who is once again the Cold War baddy, this time because it is standing up for international law.

Some people have expressed fear that NATO will allow Kosovo to unite with Albania to create Greater Albania. They are missing the point. No formal union is necessary. Thanks in large part to NATO aggression, Greater Albania is already a reality since Kosovo’s southern border is non-existent. In any event Albania, like Kosovo, is not a real country – more like a giant swarm of clans eking out meager existences while battling each other for the spoils of drug-running and prostitution rackets when they are not settling vendettas according to the Kanun of Lek. Unemployment in Kosovo is reportedly somewhere around 50%. That sounds suspiciously low to me.

To avoid the accusation of forging a Greater Albania from the ruins of a Greater Serbia, NATO will rule out any formal union, keeping "separate" the two Albanias. Fortunately, all the KLA leadership have Swiss bank accounts to receive wires from Langley, Virginia in return for postponing union indefinitely.

Washington has a few problems, however. First of all, how are they going to prevent the Serbs from fleeing independent “Kosova”? It won’t do America’s already battered humanitarian image much good when the remaining 100,000 or so Serbs flee north.

Secondly, what about the Bosnian Serbs? Does anyone think they are not paying close attention to what is going on?

Thirdly, how will the US get around Russia’s UN security resolution veto?

Fourthly, what happens when Serbia decides to strangle the bastard infant state and cuts off the electricity and supply routes to the south?

And so on.

Unlike the idiots in the White House and Downing St., the Russians are chess players and are used to thinking this far ahead.

NATO must be gambling that it can humiliate the Serbs and get away with it without serious consequences. Detaching Kosovo from Serbia will destroy Serbia’s link to its past and slowly erode its identity. The idea is that Serbia will become another Balkan zombie state that takes orders from Brussels and Washington.

So if that is the game then perhaps Serbs should consider some or all of the following steps:

1) Provide transport and shelter for all Serbs wishing to leave Kosovo and make sure it is done in front of Western cameramen.

2) Expose the shenanigans of Western diplomats in Macedonia who are encouraging similar de facto secession of Western Macedonia.

3) Highlight US House Committee on Foreign Affairs Chairman Tom Lantos' wish to appease jihadists with the gift of a Muslim state in the Balkans.

4) Encourage Bosnian Serb separation from the failed state of Bosnia.

5) Cut all electricity and supply routes to Kosovo from Serbia.

6) Highlight the fact that there is no border worth speaking of between Kosovo and Albania (ie. Greater Albania is alive and well).

7) Demand to know why there has been no protest at the destruction of ancient Serbo-Byzantine churches etc. a la failed campaign to stop the Taliban from blowing up the Bamyan Buddhas.

8) Put forward proposals to re-draw borders and liberate dozen of oppressed minorities across Europe and in the Caucasus.

And that's just for starters.

December's target - The Sage of Surbiton

For as long as I can remember, Surbiton has been an English metaphor for smug suburban complacency. Those days may be numbered. Say hello to the new kid on the blog: Marko Attila Hoare (or MAH):

http://greatersurbiton.wordpress.com/

MAH is a half-Croatian, half-English “ex”-Trotskyist and the son of Branka Magas and Quintin Hoare, marginal figures on the so-called “decent humane left” of British/Croatian politics. The choice of the blog title is meant to be a pun on "Greater Serbia" (and with that, we can safely say we have reached the frontiers of MAH's wit).

According to his website, MAH helped draft the ICTY indictment of Milosevic. He was also a translator for an aid convoy to Tuzla during the war in Bosnia, a role proudly described as an act of solidarity with “the Bosnians”, that politically-loaded epithet which excludes the Bosnian Serbs.

MAH lived in Serbia sometime between 1998 and 2000 and professes a strong emotional attachment to Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia. This is a bizarre declaration since he spent the spring of 1999 in Belgrade not as defender of Serbian sovereignty but as an observer and supporter of the NATO blitz. Perhaps what he meant is that, like his ideological bedfellows, he feels an emotional attachment to the destruction of Serbia.

He is also the author of several books on Balkan history. I have read none of them and never will because I know precisely what to expect having scoured an assortment of his "scholarly" rantings in the blogosphere: The Serbs started all of the wars of secession. Milosevic was an evil fascist genocidal tyrant. The West bombed Milosevic to prevent the slaughter of thousand upon thousands of innocent Muslims blah, blah, blah. You get the idea.

Which begs the obvious question: how did this intrepid foe of the "fascist" regime manage to outwit the "genocidal tyrant's" ruthless security apparatus, with its presumably vast network of spies and informants, and remain at liberty in Serbia for two whole years, especially during the NATO "air campaign"? Did MAH walk around with a paper target on his head to blend in with his unsuspecting Serbian hosts? Or did he spend 78 sleepless days and nights peering nervously out of sewer gratings alongside comrades from the "anti-fascist" Otpor resistance? "Genocidal dictatorship” may sound sexy but I'm afraid the image is largely spoiled by MAH's effortless survival.

MAH, however, is more polished than your run-of-the-mill professional anti-Serb. A significant portion of his “scholarship” is aimed at promoting the moral equivalence between Serbian and Croatian atrocities during the Second World War.

Ordinarily this would be a tough sell given the hundreds of thousands of Serbs who died at the hands of the Ustashe in Jasenovac and elsewhere in the NDH. But MAH has a trump card up his sleeve – the insinuation of Serbian anti-semitism. The traditional WWII Balkan narrative which recognises the unspeakable atrocities against the Serbs is fundamentally flawed, says MAH, because it downplays the fate of a far smaller number of Jews who perished not only under the NDH but also at the hands of the collaborationist Nedic regime in Serbia:

http://www.southslavjournal.com/mah.html

By centering the Balkan genocide debate on the primacy of Jewish suffering, MAH cleverly yanks the spotlight away from Croatian collaboration. The biggest victims are put on trial and the precise number of Serbs massacred by a regime whose brutality shocked even the Nazis fades into academic irrelevance. So does the inconvenient fact that Germans built and ran the camps on Serbian soil whereas Jasenovac and sister camps were created by enthusiastic Croats:

http://www.srpska-mreza.com/library/facts/Almuli.html

MAH brushes all of this Equivalence Jamboree party-pooping aside and asserts that the Serbs were “never simply defenseless victims”. Serbian suffering, like Armenian suffering, is always somehow tainted. Unlike Jewish suffering, it can never be recognized in its own right. The fact that many Serbs fought back against their fate under the NDH is held against them. What a pity they didn’t meekly accept annihilation. Just imagine how Hollywood and MAH might have honoured them!!!

(Note, however, that "moral equivalence" is taboo in discussions of more recent Balkan bloodshed. Here there is one clear victim (the Muslims) and one clear perpetrator (the Serbs). The mere rumour of a Muslim death is sufficient to provoke howls of anti-Serbian rage in the op-ed columns of the NYT and the Washington Post.)

Unsurprisingly, MAH champions the “liberation of Iraq”. I suspect this dates back to the period when Slobodan Milosevic was Saddam Hussein and vice-versa, another magical piece of mainstream journalistic equivalence that conjured up the mythical beast Slobosaddam. According to legend, the wounded creature fled to Baghdad where it was finally captured and slain. But although this "liberation" fairy-tale imploded long ago, MAH remains adamant that the whole thing was a superb idea.

Critics are fed a foul stew of euphemisms, bogus analogies and pseudo-apologies. For instance, Abu Ghraib is conveniently dismissed as an “error” as though it were a friendly-fire incident and not the carefully planned and US-government approved application of Israeli torture techniques. The Americans, of course, bear no blame for four years of unstoppable sectarian killings that, in retrospect, have made Saddam look like an unappreciated humanitarian.

Moreover, MAH thinks that Weapons of Mass Destruction (as in biological weapons etc). should never have been the main rationale for the invasion, not because there were no WMDs but because even a machete qualifies as a weapon of mass destruction, as we saw in Rwanda. Is this a plea for an international ban on machetes (and what about bread knives)? Or a case for invading other machete-wielding nations and regions (eg. The Democratic Republic of Congo, the Amazon, Bermuda)? Or perhaps a call to think twice before launching the next war of aggression?

The correct answer is none of the above. MAH is simply offering advice on how to spin future illegal and immoral invasions. The case for war against Iraq, it seems, should have been based entirely on stale and discredited “humanitarian principles”.

Genocide, tyranny, dictatorship, liberation. It’s unquestionably exciting times for sleepy Surbiton, new outpost of the militant liberal international revolution.

Return of the Dead-Enders

I just read this:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/22259.html

After a moment's reflection, it dawned on me: the Dead-Enders are back!!

Remember the Dead-Enders? No, not the clique that is running and ruining the United States.

The Dead-Enders, if you recall, was Dick Cheney’s way of belittling the Iraqi resistance during the early days of the American occupation. The Dead-Enders were “remnants” of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist army who, we were assured, would be “mopped up” within weeks.

Well not only did we fail to mop them up, they are thriving like mice in the pantry. But the good news is that they are on our side, or at least for now which is why we no longer refer to them as Dead-Enders.

The so-called “surge”, you see, is merely a cover story for a much more profound shift in American policy. The Americans have finally realized that they will never woo the Shiites away from Iran. With the key support of an anti-Shiite alliance (Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt), America has been making overtures to the Sunni tribesmen and ex-Baath party officials who only months ago were organising and planting IEDs with devastating effect.

It sounds risky but a quick overview of several inter-twined scenarios and rationales shed light on the new American eagerness to establish a Sunni proxy army. These include:

1) An American attack on Iran. Sunni troops can be thrown into battle against Shiites in the event of Iranian/Shiite retaliation against “coalition” troops in Iraq.

2) A decision to carve up Iraq into sectarian “thirds”.The Sunni statelet will need a standing army to defend its sovereignty and the economic and political interests of its foreign sponsors.

3) Baghdad drifts completely into Tehran's orbit. With a bit of hard training and discipline, the most promising Dead-Enders will be re-molded into the praetorian guard of a revolutionary council that will swing into action and topple the central government.

Stories of how we are "defeating al-Qaeda", “reducing violence”, “keeping Iraq from falling apart”, and “winning hearts and mind” are for the ignorant masses high on FoxNews and CNN. This is the last gambit to stave off a total defeat at the hands of Iran.

And how long will this marriage of convenience last? 3 months? 6 months? A year? Does anyone really believe that all is forgiven after 4 years of savage occupation?

I wonder if George Bush can hear Saddam's bones rattling with laughter.

Bavarian memories

Time to immortalise some old family holiday sketches before I mislay them forever...

Escape to Watzmann

“Come on! Time to swim!” came the unmistakeable Montenegrin bark. Yoksy, Steven and Eva turned over in their beds in disgust. Yoksy had been dreaming of glory as a fighter pilot in the looming Gulf War. Miraculously, he had managed to bomb all Iraqi military bases single-handedly without being chased by a single Iraqi aircraft or missile. He had been tucking into a celebratory jumbo deluxe chocolate ice cream back at AFHQ when Pops shattered his slumber.

Steven was slow to rise, placing his feet in the soggy towel Eva had left at his bedside the previous night.

“Come on you guys”, echoed Jenny, Pops’ right-hand woman. “We’ve got to get up. There’s not much time left for breakfast.”

“This is like a recurring nightmare”, thought Steven. “I hear the same god-damned thing every morning.” Sleepy Eva looked confused by a pair of trousers she was trying to pull over her head.

“Eva! Tonta!” screamed Yoksy. “You don’t put pants over your cabeza!!”

“Shut-up Yoksy!” came Eva's witty reply.

Looked like it was going to be one of those days. Steven heard the bathroom door shut. "Damn!" he thought. "Looks like I’ll have to pee in the pool again." He collapsed back into bed.

Yoksy suddenly charged out of the bathroom singing a new variation of “Anchors Away” which only added to the mystery of his obsession with air combat.

“Come on! We play poker!” bellowed Yoksy. He was already dealing cards on Steven’s stomach.

“Yoksy cheater!” shouted Eva. “You didn’t shuffle properly!”

Jenny was back with Pops not far behind. “Look. I told you they’re going to stop serving breakfast soon.” Eva and Yoksy turned around.

“Shut up!!” they roared in touching unison.

Jenny, ever eager to broker a compromise tried again. “OK. You can play poker in the pool as long as you get into your bathing suits immediately.”

Cheshire grins appeared on Eva and Yoksy’s faces. “Immediately” was a flexible unit of time in the Vujacic household spanning 'sometime today’ to ‘2 years from now’.

But a volcano was rumbling. “If you don’t get into your bathing suits this second…….”

Pops didn’t have to finish the sentence. The kids charged out of Room 307 as if pursued by hungry wolves.

“You see! That is how you talk to these kids!”

Alas, many lessons would have to be learned. As Pops returned to his room he collided with Eva who, in the panic, had run out of the room without her hairbrush. “What are you doing here?!?" sputtered Pops. “And why do you have ice cream on your head at this time of the morning?!?”

Quick thinking was called for…………………


A Bunch of Eisholes

“Uh” drawled Jenny. “Yelstin like, he ought to be Prez.”

“Oh shut-up” grumbled Pops. “Jenny always says the first thing that comes into her head”. He took another sip of Dunkel. “Now Yelstin – he ought to be president!”

Jenny heaved a sign of disgust. All was forgotten though when she felt a familiar tug of her threadbare armsleeve. An indignant Yoksy began to scream.

“Mama! The man didn’t let me eated his pickle!” Yoksy was nearly in tears.

“ ‘Ate’ not ‘eated’! bellowed Jenny who detected a resentful Germanic glare from the corner of her eye.

She quickly relented. “But look darling, you can play 7 games of minigolf, have 19 candy bars and order 73 ice creams if you behave yourself”.

Yoksy spotted an opportunity for blackmail. “What about Spezi-Cola?” he shouted.

Eager to avoid embarrassment, Jenny tried to change the subject. “Hey look at that interesting piece of woodwork in the ceiling!” Everyone in the restaurant looked up except for Yoksy.

“WHAT ABOUT THE SPEZI COLA?!?”

Pops stepped in with a deal. “You forget about the Spezi-Cola and I won’t thrash you in front of all of these people.” The bargain was irresistible.

“Ok, ok!” replied Yoksy. “What a bunch of Eisholes!” he whispered. As usual, his “whisper” was overheard.

“Ah ja! Die Eishole!!” came the cry from the next table. “Das ist sehr schoen!!”

Yoksy glared at the amiable eavesdropper. “Stop staring at me, ok? And I can do flips in the pool so NYAH!!!”